Kviklet 0.3 is out! We've added a bunch of new features and improvements to make your production access even more secure and efficient. The new release contains a bunch of new features most notably:

• An integration with Kubernetes Exec, you can now run commands on other pods after they've been approved through kviklet. The idea behind this is that you can audit your script executions through Kviklet as well as database acces. If this works well we will expand on this further with e.g. a web based console some time?
• Support for MS SQL Server Databases. A wish by the community, if you have other databases that you'd like us to support don't hesitate to open an issue!

I asked myself this question at my first job at Scalable Capital, 4 years ago. I had started at a FinTech startup/scaleup with somewhere between 50 and 100 engineers, enthusiastic about DevOps and a You build it, you run it mindset, that I had learned in my software engineering education in university.
But reality hit hard. You can't give every engineer full production access, and justify lax credential management with We want to give people ownership and trust.

In the fast-paced world of DevOps, safely accessing production databases is a crucial competency that balances operational efficiency with stringent security measures. This comprehensive guide explores DevOps database access best practices, ensuring your engineering teams can swiftly address issues without compromising on security or system integrity. We'll cover the importance of giving engineers access, the place of migration tools, analytics, and best practices around maintenance and operational tasks. We'll also look at the role of the Four-Eyes Principle in this post.

Kviklet as an application already allows you to execute arbitrary SQL statements on your database. However a feedback we heard multiple times is that using a simple web tool for query execution is not the same as e.g. a designated DB access software like Datagrip.

We've decided to license all our code under MIT and make it fully open-source. With this decision also comes the realization that it is unlikely we will establish a company based on Kviklet. In this post we are sharing some learnings from our journey and what's next for Kviklet.

Open source is core to the modern engineering world. In one way or another, everything runs on Linux or Android, or at the very least, is developed with tools that are available as open source. This hasn't gone unnoticed in the startup world, companies are being founded with a core product that is open source, sometimes funded purely based on GitHub Stars with no active revenue streams.

Creating Awareness for Overlooked Insecurities in Data Practice​

A digital vault as an analogy to a database, treasuring the most valuable assets of an organization. Created with Stable Diffusion

This was our first blog article, originally published on LinkedIn

In today's digital age, database access remains a vulnerable aspect for many organizations. Think of databases as the vaults storing a company's most valuable assets - personal data (PII), proprietary data, crypto keys, and other sensitive information. Yet, the reality is that the way organizations handle database access is far from secure.